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Change in direction for me.

I'm a graphic designer and flash developer,
I work at a Digital Technologies company in sunny Cape Town, South Africa.

I'm looking for a change in direction,
tired or mocking up ideas, and letting someone else build them.

I really want to get into programming,
the nitty gritty,
make some of my design and ideas come alive.

My passion really sits with UI design.

I just got hold of the book,
"Sams Teach Yourself C++ in One Hour a Day"
One thing that gets me on quite a halt is that they do not suggest a C++ compiler,
and say that you can use any, which I am sure is the case.
But for a first "newbie" finding the right or a decent compiler is quite a daunting task.

I wondered if any of you could point me in the right direction.

I'll be doing most of my work on my notebook,
which is Windows 7 64bt Ultimate.

Re: Change in direction for me.

I agree. I would recommend that you look at Microsoft Visual Studio and in particular, at .NET programming and C# generally. ,Net will help you to make the most of your previous experience with graphic design.

However, if your interest includes cross-platform programming you might be better considering gcc together with a cross-platform IDE, such as Code::Blocks.

Different peoples' opinions differ but for my money, the great strength of Visual Studio is its debugger. I've never found anything that even comes close to the power of a Microsoft debugger. But having said that, cross-platform development is almost a "must" these days and it would be a mistake to ignore it.

Re: Change in direction for me.

In my opinion, yes. Some might argue that the .NET languages are coming of age (and I'll admit that Win7 seems to have better integrated support of the .NET framework and apps actually seem peppier; maybe it's just that I finally have a 64 bit OS on my 64 bit hardware) and C# is the way to go, but I find native apps more appealing, faster, more robust, and generally easier to work with. Also, with MFC9 all the fancy bells and whistles that many found appealing in .NET are available as native MFC controls.

Re: Change in direction for me.

If you like UI design, you will love WPF!

You mentioned something about programming being not for you, I think everyone has felt like that at some point. When I started, it was very tough for me, now it's 10 years on, and each day is more exciting than the previous.

I'd also look into a very basic introduction to programming book if I were you, as some of the jargon you'll see, may not make much sense at all.